Don't Pass Me By
by TrixAreForSquids
Summary: So here's a short little one-shot about love at first sight, Bechloe edition. :)


**It's been a while since I finished Clear as Haze. All I've wanted to do lately is write. So here's a short little one-shot about love at first sight, Bechloe edition. :)**

Some people believe in love at first sight. Soul mates. Destiny. Usually these are the type of people who cry at weddings, who sob at proposals, who lose it while they watch The Notebook. Beca Mitchell was not one of these people. In fact, she found them to be quite obnoxious. She got annoyed when people lost their minds over love. She hated PDA, ignored couples, and despised romcoms. It was due to the fact that love was a cliche concept, it was over-hyped, and it was often not even true. She didn't understand the big deal of it.

Except when she did.

Beca had no idea just how drastically her outlook on life could change in just a minute, a stop-on-a-dime awakening to a different sight.

So what was it that shattered Beca's world and made her jaw drop in the middle of the fluorescent-lit, grey-tiled hallway? It wasn't an "it" rather, a who.

A redhaired wonder, that's who. Clad in suede flats, high-waisted paisley dress pants, and a peach-colored blouse, her fiery hair tucked daintily behind her ear to give way to the sparkling blue waters of her eyes. The girl was striding confidently in Beca's direction, and it was practically in slow motion. She was looking down and perhaps she sensed someone in her path, or maybe she felt the close proximity of someone's world being turned wonderfully upside down, but she brought her eyes up and met the other girl's. Her eyes danced, they were so alive, so full of life, wordlessly greeting her with more warmth than Beca had ever been regarded with by a stranger.

It really was a pity that Beca was incapacitated, too busy trying to memorize that face in vain, because it was already burned into her brain forever. The redheaded angel let a smile pass as she did by Beca, and her movement let Beca catch the whiff of strawberry in her wake.

As she turned the corner and was out of sight, Beca stood rooted to her spot in the middle of the hall, her heart hammering awake like a chick breaking out of it's shell for the first time.

That was it. Now she understood what love at first sight was. This was it and there was no doubt about it. Her brain was so scrambled that she couldn't even remember what brought her to the fourth floor of the office building. She looked down to the papers in her hand and literally had to read their contents before figuring out what she had initially been doing. For the rest of the day, she was preoccupied with the sighting of the girl. She was distracted beyond all reasonable compare.

Every day after that, she would find an excuse to go to the fourth floor. Refilling coffee, going to get more office supplies for her cubicle (do you even know how many boxes of blue Bic ballpoints she had hoarded?), going to the bathroom there. But she never saw the redhead up there again. There were thirtyfive floors in this stupid highrise office building, so the woman could have belonged to any of the other thirty four besides Beca's. She could have been a client completing business, for all Beca knew, it was possible she didn't even work there.

She just knew that she couldn't forget the woman no matter what. It was the striking feeling of seeing someone achingly beautiful and knowing they should be in your future, scratch that they should _be_ your future, and after imagining a life with them in an instant they walk away. It was terribly frustrating not having any details about her except her physical appearance. No name, no record of her, there was literally nothing to go off of. After five weeks, the small brunette felt hopeless. She knew it was just her luck to see the love of her life literally pass her by. Based on the erratic feeling of her heart that day, she had never been more positive of anything in her life, that that's exactly what the girl was to her. Beca kicked herself for not saying something that day. She imagined the many variations of what she would say. Pickup lines, or something deep to catch her attention, even saying something mundane would have been better than the nothing that actually happened.

So after five weeks of waning hope, she decided that she had to let it go. It was morning and she was walking the two city blocks from the company parking garage to the office and she was literally in the process of resigning to her fate of being forever alone, never to see the ginger again, when fate played a funny trick on her.

Walking down the very same sidewalk, past the dingey brick buildings, red hair was bobbing down the sidewalk. At the same height that Beca remembered. Wearing the same unique white paisley high waisted pants.

Holy shit. It was the girl.

Beca's coffee splashed to the ground out of her open hand, and she jumped as the cup clattered to the ground. The redhead, despite being a ways down the street, turned at the sound. Beca was too far away to see her eyes in detail but wanted nothing more than to decrease the distance between their bodies.

But her legs were locked in place. She was rooted to the spot again. She urged her stupid little legs to work but they refused to function. She looked to her black flats, begging her feet in them to move. Her blue slacks stayed still as well, as if in a pact of non-motion with the stupid shoes. She disobeyed her desperate wishes to run forward to connect with the ginger woman, who was now turned around and walking away. Her figure got smaller as she made her way down the street and around the corner. Defeat.

And then she felt her legs shaking. She registered the weakness in her knees, because she could feel them again. Beca took a shaky step forward, and another. And her slow steps turned into a jelly-legged jog, and she shrugged her leather work satchel off of her shoulder as her arms began to pump. She reached full speed as she tore down the city street, the buildings passing faster than they ever had before, the spots of gum were blurs on the sidewalk. She ripped around the corner, whipping her head around frantically in all the directions and spotted the redhead half a block up the street heading into a Starbucks. Beca could feel her shoes as they departed from her feet but they were the last thing on her mind as they were left in her careless footsteps on the sidewalk behind her.

She reached the Starbucks, and found the woman immediately due to her hair. Her panting made the other patrons turn their attention directly to her. A mother grabbed her young son by the arm and pulled him closer in concern. A man in his twenties protectively grabbed his phone, looking like he was going to call 911.

Oh right. She probably looked insane. No shoes, panting, coffee splattered on the bottom of her pant legs. But this couldn't stop her. The ginger still hadn't turned around, despite all the other customers looking at the crazed Beca. As the brunette woman approached her with a heart that threatened to burst, she saw the headphones in her ears. She surged forward, and tapped her on the shoulder. It took probably half a second but it felt like an infinity as she turned to face Beca.

"I've been looking for you my whole life," Beca blurted out with as much composure as she could muster. The whole Starbucks was quiet, holding their breath for whatever unpredictable move came next. And Beca did what she had pictured doing for the last five weeks. She pulled the girl in, one hand on her shoulder and the other cupping her face, and kissed her pillowy soft lips sweet on her own.

It only lasted a second before she forced herself to pull back. The other girl didn't punch her in the face, so that was a good sign. There was a smile in that girl's eyes though, blue and shining and curious as hell. Her mouth didn't smile, perhaps she felt the weight of the crowd in the coffee shop's eyes on her, but her eyes said it all.

"I'm Chloe."


End file.
